Commons News

In Japan, a project called the “Intellectual Property Outline” started in July 2002 and includes some provisions that seek to accomplish many of the same goals as the Creative Commons. While it is clear they were not influenced by us directly, it’s interesting to watch the convergence of alternate forms of copyright come from governments world-wide. From section 3.(3) 3):

3) Protection of creative activities and promotion of distribution of media contents

The GOJ will take the following actions in this regard.

1. For promotion of smooth distribution of media contents, in FY 2002 the GOJ will start to support efforts to establish a new distribution system that combines new technology and the copyright contract system and to develop and disseminate various systems such as the contact system for copyright licenses on computer networks (to be implemented by FY 2004) and the system for right holders’ declaration of intention concerning the scope of contents to be available (e.g. “free use mark”). (The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology)

They even mention a “free use mark” that sounds a lot like the CC icons.

Shanghaiphotos.com is a site devoted to the city of Shanghai run by an avid hobbyist photographer. It also happens to be the first website based in China (that we know of) to use Creative Commons licenses for its content.

Stanford University will host a Spectrum Policy Conference March 1st and 2nd. The topic: the importance of the airwaves, and the ever-increasing number of wireless devices relying on them, to a healthy communications policy. The central question: Spectrum, property or commons? With FCC Chairman Powell and many other noteworthies in attendance, it promises to be an enlightening weekend. Registration is now open.

Two new interesting works with political themes have been released under Creative Commons licenses.

Gritty, A Critique of the Global Good Life, by Michael Wadleigh and Cleo Huggins, is an overview of global economics and politics presented in an easily digestible format. The work offers a thoughtful commentary on politics, the media, and other social issues. Gritty complements its critiques with a wide variety of statistics and graphics that tell a story beyond words.

Your Guide to Modern Living, by Raymond Pirouz, makes the case for a new type of economic system based on abundance rather than scarcity. It asserts that economic progress — more specifically automation — might free people to find richness in life through family, creativity, and spirituality.

On XML.com, Kendall Clark gives a clear and accessible review of the semantic web transition, then criticizes our own RDF metadata strategy, specifically. It’s useful and insightful feedback, so we’ve taken the time to respond at length here.

(If you’re not familiar with RDF or the semantic web, or why they’re important to our mission, read more. )

We want to get RDF out there. We want people to use it on their sites even if they don’t fully understand it. (Why should they need to?) RDF needs momentum more than perfection to become useful; we’re working to provide some of this momentum. We fully recognize Kendall’s argument that our recommendation is not the purest from a technical standpoint. It is, however, a practical approach to getting users to integrate RDF.

On our site, we use content negotiation to send RDF/XML to programs that request it and HTML to normal browsers.

But for our users, we recommend the quickest and easiest way to have RDF somewhere. We think it’s better to have RDF in HTML comments than no RDF at all.

Kendall is correct to point out that we haven’t provided enough guidance on more advanced ways to connect HTML pages to their RDF descriptions. We’ll work on that, with the help of the community (including folks like Kendall). Hopefully, we’ll be able to put together a document with the best practices for including our RDF in all formats, include various versions of HTML and RSS.

Our goal is to get RDF out there. We’re trying to maximize RDF presence by adapting to our different types of users.